April 1, 2013

Carnival of Evolution, #58 -- Visions of the Evolutionary Future

What does the future look like? For some, the future is the place of constant progress and a place where dreams become reality. For others, the future is a scary, dystopian place. When actualized, however, future worlds fall somewhere in between these two visions. Can we make accurate projections about the future? As I pointed out in a Synthetic Daisies post from February [1], futurists and technologists have a pretty dismal track record at projecting future scenarios, and often get things notoriously wrong.

UPPER LEFT: Ad from the 1982 opening of EPCOT Center, Florida. UPPER RIGHT: Dystopic future city from the movie "Idiocracy" (Inset is the cover of "Future Shock" by Alvin Toffler). BOTTOM LEFT:Bank of England Economic Forecast (circa 2011). BOTTOM RIGHT: New New York, circa 3000 (from the TV show "Futurama").

With visions of the future in mind, this month's Carnival of Evolution (#58) theme is the future of evolution. While a significant component of evolutionary biology involves reconstructing the past [2], we are actually (with error, of course) also predicting the future. Yet can we do any better than futurists or technologists? It is hard to say, and if you have opinions on this I would be glad to hear them. However, this month's CoE will address five themes that may (or may not) help us understand where the complexity of life is headed.

A new academic discipline: prospective phylogenetics?

PART I: The future of evolution is an open book.

Some depictions of future evolution involves both "speculative evolution" and "hyperevolved" creatures [3]. The work of Dougal Dixon [4] is a nice introduction to this point of view. His work ties together science fiction allegory with a functional view of phenotypic evolution to "project" the following future taxa: the engineered pack animal (5 million years from now), the aquatics (50,000 years from now), the tic (1,000 from now with help from engineered soft materials), and the symbiont carrier (10,000 years of coevolution). All of these examples are, of course, based on fictitious forms. And the rate of evolutionary change bears no relationship to known examples of evolution. Nevertheless, these conceptions highlight the role of chance in evolution. One can see parallels (and discrepancies) with this animation of whale evolution.

Here are some posts that provide some scientific fact to inform our speculations about what future evolution might look like:

* There are two more in-depth critiques on ENCODE this month. Ken Weiss from Mermaid's Talefocuses on a new paper called "On the immortality of television sets: “function” in the human genome according to the evolution-free gospel of ENCODE" [5]. Both Ken's post and the paper critique the ENCODE projects results on several grounds. And Larry Moran's blog Sandwalk features W. Ford Doolittle's critique of the ENCODE project, which is one of four papers that critically address the claims made by the ENCODE group.

Another depiction involves using a top-down design method to understand forces of natural selection. The video game Spore provides an example of this type of top-down design. While this is an example of "naive evolution" [7], it does provide a conceptual mechanism for future phenotypes.

Above are a collection of "animal: forms from the video game Spore. In Spore, phenotypes are determined in a top-down fashion, but live in a world of "naive" ecology and evolution. They still exhibit a form of (non-Darwinian) descent with modification.

Besides the use of virtual worlds and experimental methods, we might also use LEGO kits and other types of physical models to represent possible phenotypes. Below is an entry in the MOCathalon by Sean and Stephanie Mayo, featuring a number of existing invertebrate species. This approach can be leveraged for our purposes by building on the work of Mark Changizi, who observed a scaling law that is shared between LEGOs and the natural world [9].

PART III: What are the historical contingencies (or time-dependencies)?

Yet another depiction involves projecting future evolutionary constraints. How will existing evolutionary constraints produce diversity into the future, or how will new constraints arise in conjunction with future events? These projections can be made in a number of ways, but here we will focus on biogeography. Specifically, how will the present and future dynamics of plate tectonics and continental drift affect the distribution of species and ecosystems many years from now? Fortunately, it is possible to build projections of future plate tectonics using geophysical data and computational models such as plate motion vectors [10].

The final depiction we will discuss here is the future of behavioral change and the evolution of intelligent behavior. Changes in behavior such as migration patterns or foraging behaviors might be observed as a consequence of climate change [14]. However, behavioral repertoires themselves might undergo future evolution, perhaps resulting in evolved intelligence [15]. One way to address this issue is to look to the evolutionary past, and find "invariant" (or recurrent) behaviors that might shape possible evolved behaviors (or their constraints) in the future.

The right way (top, bottom) and wrong way (inset) to think about how organisms use the electromagnetic spectrum.

PART V: Future Analytical Tools.

A bit beyond the scope of this presentation but nevertheless important is the future of data integration and analysis. Recall that our knowledge of evolution is based in part on reconstruction of the past. Therefore, tools that provide better reconstructions of the past (and present) can inform our projections of the future

There is also a related paper published in 2012 by the same group: Ratcliff, W.C., Denison, R.F., Borrello, M., and Travisano, M. (2012). Experimental evolution of multicellularity. PNAS, 109(5), 1595-1600.